FreeOCR is a basic optical character recognition package that will quickly extract the text from scanned documents, images or PDF files.

The program's clean and simple interface means it's easy to get started. At the click of a button it can import a page from your scanner, open a PDF file or an image (TIF, BMP, JPG, GIF and PNG formats are supported). Then one more click on the OCR button and FreeOCR will scan your image for text, displaying it in a separate window.

The accuracy of the results proved variable, in our tests: you may have to spend some time editing the finished text before you get quality results. (The OCR engine also requires images with a resolution of at least 200dpi, so screen grabs are unlikely to produce useful results.)

And while FreeOCR can open multi-page PDFs, you must work through them manually, one at a time, which could prove tedious for lengthy documents.

Still, with the right documents FreeOCR could still save you a great deal of time, and it's so easy to use that it won't take long to find out if this is the right tool for you. Well worth a look. But please note: the program will attempt to install additional elements prior to installing the main program - read each EULA carefully, and click Decline to avoid installing potentially unwanted software.

Be very careful when installing. The first 3 windows will ask you to install software not required to run freeocr, so I would suggest clicking on DECLINE for the first 3 windows, before finally getting to the actual installer of FreeOCR.

There's a vast amount to learn, of course, and that's even before you start building your game. But there's plenty of documentation, tutorials, demos and sample projects to point you in the right direction.

The package is now entirely free, too - no annoying limitations, nag screens or anything else. Epic now only requires that you pay a 5% royalty after the first $3,000 of revenue per product per quarter. And even then, you "pay no royalty for film projects, contracting and consulting projects such as architecture, simulation and visualization."

8.48 brings:
- Optimized grass rendering and procedural foliage system preview
- Plugins available in Marketplace
- Improved accuracy for motion blur
- New Tone Mapper
- Support for all the latest VR hardware including Oculus Rift, Samsung Gear VR, Steam VR and HTC Vive, Leap Motion, and Sony's Project Morpheus for PlayStation 4
- "Scrubbable" network replays with rewind support and live time scrubbing
- Visualize the memory footprint of game assets in an interactive tree map UI